Human Hunger and Benefit-sharing

According to some calculations, the world population will have grown to 10 billion people in 2050, while at the moment there is food for 6.4 billion people. The demand for more variety in food will increase in China and India, and also 42 percent of the crops will be lost because of pests, drought, salt, heat and cold. Genetically modified organisms could be one of the important ways to meet this challenge, by using the same amount of land in worsened circumstances. In this respect, genetic modification may be called a global technology. Individual countries cannot develop and use this technology on their own. International cooperation and networks are necessary to keep the development of this technology going. Countries will have to make large long-term investments to participate in genetic modification, and Third World countries will not be able to participate.

There are two conditions that have to be fulfilled in order for Third World countries to be able to join genetic modification: the building of an infrastructure and the ownership of genetic resources. The poor countries cannot fulfill the first condition because their very restricted budget does not allow equipping laboratories with advanced and expensive computers and all kinds of machines. Although many poor countries have abundant genetic resources, they are not able to profit because these genetic resources also are present in other countries (like potato and tomato in the Andes), and ...

Get A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.